Sisters are doing it for themselves

Maggie Millar

Women of the world can finally rejoice because if there’s one thing that’s back with a vengeance this year it’s hair... and here, there and everywhere else you fancy.

Yup, a well tended but fulsome ‘lady garden’ is now posh and ultra-fashionable, thanks in part to Gwyneth Paltrow who admitted she “rocks a Seventies vibe down there these days.”

Well, where Gwyneth goes....

And, not be outdone in the follicular stakes, many men (more so celebs with weedy chins, to be honest) are now sporting beards that would make even Ranulph Fiennes sit up and take notice after six months battling the wilderness.

But, frankly, wasn’t it about time?

Women have been obsessed with hair removal since the ‘80s, compelled to submit themselves body and soul to sadistic beauticians who expounded the benefits of the full leg/armpit/ Brazilian wax. Ouch!

Happy to submit to the tedious pain of electrolysis (double ouch) or willing to part with their hard-earned wages to undergo expensive laser treatments.

And if that was too hard to handle, there were always the pain-free hair removal creams to fall back on (foul-smelling), the bleaching creams (nippy) or....shh... the other half’s (now blunt) razor blade.

And to what effect?

Well, there’s no point in beating around the bush...it makes a grown woman look like a sorry-looking pre-pubescent; a peely-wally plucked chicken who could use a furry blanket.

The question is though, as in most things in life, where’s the happy medium, where to stop?

Should we go all out, cast aesthetic concerns aside, and have impressively fuzzy armpits (remember the furore when Julia Roberts exposed her pits on the red-carpet?).

Still get the legs waxed for a fortnight’s summer holiday in the sun but cultivate a 15-tog down to get us through the chilly Scottish winter?

I only ask because scientists still don’t know what hair on humans is all about.

One recent theory purports we lost our body hair to stop our brains from overheating as they evolved.

If that’s true, then women by default would seem to have the evolutionary advantage over most men. Only saying.

And bald men who lost their sense of humour when they lost their hair could console themselves by claiming god-like status.

But where’s the evolutionary advantage in actually gaining hair in middle age? It seems especially cruel for women to start losing their glorious mane only to find hair magically transplanting itself in the strangest of places elsewhere. Toes. Kid you not...

When it gets to that stage, I’m going all out for all the help I can get.

So, as in all things, the golden ticket should be personal choice; the choice to grow, the choice to not and, for the younger generation’s sake, I’m glad.

After all, why should they feel pressured to conform to some silly prescription of what a ‘perfect’ woman should look like?